Chaos and punishment battle for supremacy in the battlefields of Albion once again as the unyielding carnage of STINGRAY overloads your stereo and stains your brain. Putrefacting punk gnashing between metal stained flourishes of hateful competence and a touch of total rhythmic lobotomy. Tin Savages fantastic growled vocals trample his unmistakable London drawl across the five muscular and sickening tracks, the result of which is the musical child of ASID, ENT, SHOK, BGK, and a musical representation of two skeletons strutting through an alleyway on an early 80s CHUY-designed AGNOSTIC FRONT flyer. Boasting an A-Team of London punk minds, a real lust for metallic punk a la GBH and enough panache to make an ear piercing racket sound stylish: Stingray are simply on fucking fire.

Our take: LVEUM brings us the debut EP from this new London hardcore band featuring Tin Savage, whose artwork you know from countless underground hardcore releases over the past several years, on vocals. With a membership that pulls from the New Wave of British Hardcores A-list, Stingray has a heavy, powerful hardcore sound that shows more than a little crossover peeking in around the edges. While thats not too different in principle from what Power Trip (and the loads of bands they have influenced) do, Stingrays take on crossover has none of that Bay Area Thrash polish, sounding more like the bands from mid and late 80s New York who had a grittier, nastier take on the sound. Feeding Time makes me think of records like Agnostic Fronts Cause for Alarm and Crumbsuckers Life of Dreams, but with the jackhammer production that you hear in the best underground hardcore of today rather than the (often awkward) bigger-budget studio recordings on those records. Totally punishing.